Happy Chinese New Year! I thought there was some kind of turf war going on outside, because it sounded like lots of small arms fire and the occasional mortar, and then I glanced at the clock and saw it was midnight, and stopped worrying about rocket-propelled grenades crashing through my windows. It's just the sound of celebration, with the occasional finger or hand being blown off, and doubtless plenty of guns being fired in the air without much thought to where the falling bullets will land, because, hey, this is Oakland. And I love Oakland, I truly do, and I suspect my next novel will in some respects be a love song for the East Bay in general, but man, fools do like to shoot their guns up in the air around here.

Over at the Third Alternative message boards, a table of contents and opening paragraphs from issue #37 have been posted (including the opening of my own "Terrible Ones"). Go read! Then get an issue.

Michaela Roessner's story "Inside Outside" is up at Sci Fiction this week. It's the story she brought to Rio Hondo, and it's a lot of fun, with quantum physics, miniature golf, and other such wonders, so go read it.

I've started reading Fitcher's Brides by Gregory Frost -- well, actually, I've just made it through the nice long introduction by Terri Windling, and haven't gotten to the novel itself yet. My Rangergirl story concerns Gilles de Rais, who was likely one of the inspirations for Perrault's Bluebeard, and reading this introduction (with its discussion of Bluebeard variants, precursors, recurring images, etc.) has given me some ideas about how to tie the various flopping plot threads of the Rangergirl story together better, which means I might, just possibly, finish writing it. I'm planning to work on it this weekend.

I went to Berkeley tonight, to Au Coquelet, where I sat for a couple of hours sipping coffee and scribbling about 800 words of a new story (written under the influence of massive doses of Theodore Sturgeon fiction and a peculiar bittersweet nostalgia for things past). It's poetic, wordy, expository, and complicated, and I might well ruin it, but if I pull it off, it could be one of my best. Let's call it the Twenty story. I might be living with it for a little while. Or it might dry up on me completely and never get farther than the few pages I've written so far. It's too soon to call it.

Feels good to be writing short fiction again, though.